Solzhenitsyn's new book [The Oak and the Calf] is not really new. It was written in the Soviet Union, and has been revised for this English edition. It is part autobiography, part indictment of Soviet literary politics and censorship, and part onslaught on the entire Soviet system.

But the largest indictment of the Soviet political establishment is not what Solzhenitsyn writes about it: it is what it has made of Solzhenitsyn himself. This book reveals it all.

As an inhabitant of Gulag, and later as an ex-convict, teaching in school and writing by night, this writer may once have been self-centred in the limited sense of the term, but he was obviously profoundly sensitive to human feelings, frailties and dignities. The early novels, which are great novels, were characterised by Lukacs, the most eminent of Marxist critics, as real achievements of "socialist realism".

It would be interesting to...